Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

By Chinh Vo Moviemakers Sue Tens of Thousands of BitTorrent Users A coalition of independent filmmakers has sued more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders for copyright infringement in federal court in Washington D.C., the Hollywood Reporter, Esq. blog reports. The series of lawsuits marks the first major move in the U.S. by the movie industry to target individual torrent downloaders, rather than the torrent sites themselves, and is preceded by similar actions in Germany and the U.K. According to ... Read More...

Supreme Court Holds That Federal Courts Have Jurisdiction over Unregistered Copyright Claims By Debbie Rosenbaum – Edited by Gary Pong Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, No. 08–103 (U.S. Mar. 2, 2010) Slip Opinion In a unanimous 8-0 decision, the United States Supreme Court overturned a Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision which held that the district court lacked jurisdiction to certify either the class or the settlement in a case involving holders of unregistered copyrights. The Court of Appeals for the ... Read More...

By Tyler Lacey RealNetworks Won’t Appeal Decision Declaring Its DVD Copying Software in Violation of DMCA On March 4, Wired reported that RealNetworks plans to cease litigation of a lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (“MPAA”) alleging that its DVD copying software, RealDVD, violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). RealNetworks had initially planned to appeal a California district court’s decision that the software illegally circumvented the DVD encryption technology, Content Scramble System. However, after two years ... Read More...

Court Excludes Litigation Fees from Calculation of Damages under DMCA § 512(f). By Debbie Rosenbaum – Edited by Gary Pong Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., Case No. 5:07-cv-03783-JF (N.D. Cal., Feb. 25, 2010) Slip Opinion (Hosted by the Citizen Media Law Project) On February 25, 2010, Judge Fogel for the Northern District of California held that a plaintiff suing over a wrongful Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) takedown notice can only recover for damages that were proximately caused by said ... Read More...

By Joey Seiler Google Buzz Gets Privacy Groups Talking—and Filing Complaints When Google launched Buzz, its new social media function, on February 9, the Internet giant moved into Facebook territory by sharing information and connecting social groups. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s complaint to the FTC, Google may have also moved into Facebook territory by violating users’ privacy. (PaidContent covered EPIC’s FTC complaint against Facebook when the company changed its privacy settings in December 2009.) The New York ... Read More...